Unlike Dylan, Postal Service Delivery Trucks May Never Go Electric Now
It could have been much worse, but still sucks bigly.
The Senate’s version of Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Blowjobs for Billionaires Bill had a nasty little provision tucked into it: It repealed the roughly $3 billion in new funding that Joe Biden’s climate bill gave the US Postal Service to electrify much of its delivery fleet. Thanks to that boost in funding, something like 75 percent of the USPS’s 60,000 planned “Next Generation Delivery Vehicles” were set to be electric, up from just a tenth of the new fleet under the Trump administration. Electrifying most of the USPS delivery fleet — the biggest US government vehicle fleet outside the Pentagon’s — would have been a huge step in reducing the federal government’s carbon footprint.
But Donald Trump doesn’t believe in climate change, and nothing Biden signed into law was legal since he stole the election, so all of Biden’s initiatives to reduce government carbon emissions had to be reversed, by executive action when Trump could get away with it, or by the Republican Congress the rest of the time. It’s not surprising, just disgusting, that congressional Republicans are hoping to repeal virtually all of Biden’s clean energy provisions, including the ones that brought new jobs to red states. They’ll just blame the inevitable factory closings on Democrats anyway.
The bill revisions drafted by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee would, among other cuts, rescind $1 billion in funding for the purchase of postal EVs, although the summary released by committee Chair Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) doesn’t say what would happen to the remaining $2 billion of the EV allocation. Maybe it would replace the electric trucks with their gas-guzzling internal-combustion counterparts, which get terrible mileage.
Because of production delays and problems in the development process, Oshkosh, the military contractor that won the contract to build the beluga whale-shaped NGDV trucks, has only delivered roughly 100 of the things, although it was supposed to have built more like 3,000 of them by the end of 2024. The full rollout of the NGDVs was to have taken around a decade and delivered about 66,000, with three quarters of them being electric. To help move electrification forward more quickly, USPS under Biden purchased hundreds of Ford E-Transit electric vans and got them into service, and spent about a half-billion dollars on renovating post offices and sorting facilities so they could install chargers and other stuff to rearrange mail delivery around electric delivery vehicles.
As many have pointed out, electric trucks are ideally suited for the frequent stops and starts of mail delivery. When they’re “idling” while a mail carrier goes up the walk to a mailbox at someone’s house, they don’t use any electricity except for accessories like air conditioning (the old rattletraps being replaced don’t even have AC).
Defunding the electric trucks means that the Postal Service will keep spending God knows how much money a year for guzzoline for decades, even as other delivery fleets go electric. It’s a nice little gift to Trump’s beneficiaries in the fossil fuel industry. Mail trucks take forever to replace — the old clunkers still on the road were built in the 1980s and ‘90s, and are long past their planned retirement date thanks to congressional inaction. As a result, even as the post-Trump economy decarbonizes, USPS will be stuck with its gas-burners for decades, while the price of gas goes higher and higher. Higher costs, more pollution, and of course all the lost opportunity for doing something big about climate.
Now, here’s the kicker: Until a few days ago, it all could have been much worse. So yay?
That’s because as originally written, the bill would have forced the Post Office to return all its electric vehicles — some 7,000 all told — and related infrastructure to the General Services Administration, which would auction them off for whatever it might get. As the Washington Post explained Friday (gift link),
The proposal is unlikely to generate much revenue for the government; there is almost no private-sector interest in the mail trucks, and used EV charging equipment — built specifically for the Postal Service and already installed in postal facilities — generally cannot be resold.
“The funds realized by auctioning the vehicles and infrastructure would be negligible. Much of infrastructure is literally buried under parking lots, and there is no market for used charging equipment,” Peter Pastre, the Postal Service’s vice president for government relations and public policy, wrote to senators this month.
Essentially, the plan would have just thrown out thousands of perfectly good electric vehicles (and torn up a half-billion dollars worth of charging equipment) for pennies on the dollar (if that much) to satisfy Republicans’ irrational hatred of EVs and Joe Biden. Totally worth it in the Trumpian mind of course, because EVs are Of The Devil and fossil fuel must be kept on life support at any cost.
Fortunately, over the weekend, Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that the throw it all away provision went beyond the limits of the “Byrd Rule,” which limits reconciliation bills to taxing and appropriating funds. Tearing out existing infrastructure and having the GSA repossess and auction off all the existing USPS EVs was outside the rules, so if Senate Republicans keep that provision at all, it would be subject to the 60-vote threshold as an amendment to the Big Buggery Bastard Bill. We can’t see seven Democrats voting for that.
So hooray, the worst the Big Blowies for Billionaires Bill can do is cancel the rest of the Postal Service’s contracts for buying EVs, which is plenty bad enough. But if the already-built charging infrastructure remains in place, a future Democratic administration and Congress — gotta have both — could at least get postal electrification partly back on track.
As it is, the sudden loss of the planned EV fleet will be enormously expensive for the Postal Service, which will have to renegotiate with Oshkosh to buy gas-powered versions of tens of thousands of NGDV trucks. Pastre, the VP guy, wrote that the switch “will cost the Postal Service $1.5 billion of funds that we desperately need in order to serve the American people, and it will seriously cripple our ability to replace an aging and obsolete delivery fleet.” Of course, Republicans have always wanted to privatize the Postal Service, or at least its parcel delivery operations, the one part of it that makes money, so strangling USPS of funds may yet help that project along.
There’s still the chance that further Trump fuckery down the line could imperil USPS’s partial EV fleet; Trump might simply order that no funds be spent on charging them, leaving the vehicles immobilized. The USPS isn’t supposed to be subject to that sort of executive-branch fuckery, which would be kind of illegal, but that hasn’t stopped the bastard so far. Just a thought.
Finally, there’s also the slim chance that Republicans just won’t be able to pass the Big Bumptious Buffoonery Bill at all, thanks to the terrible Medicaid cuts and other crap in it, so we can always hope for that.
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OT:
Nice Times story
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250625-can-ai-speak-the-language-japan-tried-to-kill
One of the few good uses I can think of for AI is to preserve ancient languages, like Navajo, Cornish, and Ainu.
That's right, Ainu still exists. The people live on Hokkaido, the northernmost large island of Japan. They are believed to have been among the people who walked over the land bridge from Asia to North America.
This is cool.
I just got off the phone with my boss about USPS and a current difficulty we are having in obtaining a mission-critical mailing and I pop over here to break for a mome and jeezuss louise-uss it's the USPS again and yadda yadda yadda.
You know what the deal with the USPS is, and why the Goppers have been trying to kill it for fifty years -- it provides good-paying, stable, union employment for black people and women and veterans. It'd be great if the Democrats could figure that out and hammer on that point when it comes time to decently fund the USPS.